PADI Adventure Diving Course
We have already had a great start to this year with diving
With Solomon Pachtinger completing his PADI Adventure Diving Course, with our PADI Staff Instructor David Stangroom.
On January the 2nd, due to a north wind, we went over the Akamas, Safari style, to the beautiful Geronisos Bay.
After refreshing the skills on how to put the equipment together, we went through the all the briefings, buddy checks and signal reviews for dive one doing Peak Performance Buoyancy. Entering the water, a nice surprise at 21°c, we don our fins, signal to descend and head out to near the island, completing all the skills getting our hovers and swimming techniques perfected. We exited about 39 mins later.
We were pleased to come back and find still blue skies and due to the north wind we were sheltered from, it was a beautiful 23°c. We had a debrief with some nice warm coffee and then warmed up some more in the sun.
About 45 mins later, we start the Navigation section on the surface, teaching/refreshing compass use in a straight line, left turns and right turns to form a square pattern. We also covered how to measure distance whilst underwater, and how to use other methods to navigate underwater (Topography, Sea life, Vegetation, Depth, Sounds and Lighting to list a few). Once the briefing was completed, we donned our kit, did our buddy check and entered the water, heading out into the bay.
We descended and after laying out our line of 30mts, we worked out how many fin kicks it took to complete. We then moved on to doing square patterns, a few mistakes here and there but rectified quickly and easily (which way to rotate the bezel). We then went off for a dive, with Solomon then leading us back to shore using compass and natural navigation skills that he had learnt.
We got out, still amazingly warm with blue skies, and had some lunch and coffee.
After lunch, we started the briefing for the PADI Fish Identification, the 3rd and final dive of the Adventure course. Again, after the briefing we got in the water and descended. It was amazing with all the Mediterranean puffer fish, Groupers, wrasses and Trumpet fish around a long with many others. We even had an Octopus that hung around us, squirting ink every time a grouper came near it!! Eventually we decided to bid it fair well. Soloman did very well describing and categorizing what we had seen.
